The panel was organised by the European Parliament's Croatian office on the occasion of International Women's Day and an EP report on gender equality in the media in the European Union.
Ljubicic presented the findings of a survey by her office on the representation and depiction of women and men in the media. It was carried out from April through June 2012, covering the front pages of nine websites with 6.5 million monthly visits each.
Together, those websites had close to 100 million visits, which speaks of the reach of their content, as a result of which the way women and men are presented and the topics they are linked with represent "a social impact which must not be ignored," she said.
The survey covered 514 front pages and 12,241 articles with a photo - 38% of the photos were of women, 50% of men and 12% of them together.
Men accounted for 82% of news on politics and business and women for only 12, Ljubicic said, adding that of the 360 photos accompanying a front page breaking news story, 20% showed women and 80% showed men.
Important news items were shown at the top of the front page, with women in 23% of the accompanying photos and men in 36%, she said.
Men were represented in 94% of sports news, the second most frequently published news, while women were most represented in health and beauty articles (88%), ads (81%) and show business news (71%), Ljubicic said, adding that in one of three photos a women was either undressed or half-dressed.
"The sexist stereotypes depicted in the media are gender discriminatory, degrading and insulting," she said, referring to the Beijing Declaration and the Council of Europe recommendation that "the concept of sexism must be condemned just as racism."
Speaking in a discussion on the introduction of women's quotas in journalism, Hina director Branka Gabriela Vojvodic said "the question of women in the media can't be viewed separately from the position of women in general, although we are talking about a specific profession."
She said women's quotas on election slates "are sort of a solution, but not a permanent one as coercion never works in the long term."
Although the number of women journalists is not small, they lag behind men when it comes to management positions. Also, only 7% of newspaper columns and op-eds are written by women.